New mobile technology can test for agricultural pathogens in Africa

A University of Colorado Boulder faculty member will travel to Africa later this month to test a mobile smartphone technology developed by his team to rapidly detect and track natural carcinogens, including aflatoxin, which is estimated to contaminate up to 25 percent of the global food supply and cause severe illnesses in humans and animals.

The new technology includes using mobile devices, rapid diagnostic test strips (similar to pregnancy test strips), geographical tagging and cloud computing to rapidly detect, quantify and track common crop pathogens in real time to reduce their harmful impacts in developing countries. “Our new method is more sensitive, faster and more quantitative than any of the existing rapid tests out there on the market,” said Cooper.

Aflatoxins are highly toxic chemical poisons produced primarily by the fungus Aspergillus flavus, a mold that affects nuts, seeds and legumes and is known to cause liver cancer and compromised immune function in animals and humans. “Our new tools should ultimately allow farmers in developing countries to identify and track pathogens infecting seeds and share their data, which could improve crop yields and prevent crop losses,” he said.

The Agricultural Research Connections conference sponsored by the Gates Foundation will take place Aug. 25-30 in Nairobi and the nearby market town of Naivasha in Kenya. The goal of the workshops is to develop new partnerships among scientists doing agricultural research with the potential to create new pathways out of poverty for African farming families. “We are excited to meet with local farmers, community members and scientists to identify how we can best implement our mobile diagnostic tools in order to advance pathogen detection in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Cooper, also in the psychology and neuroscience department.

Identifying and tracking contaminated seeds is especially challenging in places like Africa, where individual farmers often keep their seed stocks stashed in boxes and sacks around the household and regularly trade them at village markets, said Cooper. “There will be a lot of work going on at the conference by scientists using interesting genetic tools to reduce or mitigate problems with aflatoxin,” said Cooper. “But without the ability to detect it, it’s difficult to know if one is actually succeeding.”

The testing method developed by Cooper and his team has been proven to be both fast and accurate. Users first obtain samples of grain suspected to be tainted, liquefy them and expose them to a customized test strip specifically designed to detect aflatoxin. A smartphone or tablet is then held over the test strip for automated image analysis. Within minutes the smartphone screen displays two bands – a control band and a test band to quantify the level of the grain infection.

A key part of the “Lab-on-Mobile Device,” or LMD, platform developed by Cooper’s team is the Mobile Imaging Ratiometry, or MRI, a unique software algorithm developed by Cooper that analyzes the images from the smartphones or tablets in real time. The information is geo-tagged and shared through cloud computing in remote data storage facilities that can be instantly made available to project participants. The LMD technology also will allow for the creation of real-time electronic “push-pin” maps showing places where aflatoxins have been detected.